As the weather has been getting warmer I have had these grand ideas for us to go out walking more in the evenings. It doesn’t work out half the time because one or both of us has something already scheduled (knitting groups, writing groups, appointments, rehearsals, meetings, etc.) but the other half the time we *could* do it, if we were less inclined to come home after a long day and flop listlessly into a chair for the rest of the evening. This weekend, however, took care of all my pent up need to go walking, at least for a little while, and at least half of that I can blame on the new GPS unit I got a few weeks ago.

Since I’ve been at the company now for 5 years, I got a little 5 year certificate and a gift, which was a voucher good for any item I wanted to pick from a rather lengthy list of choices that included everything from the useful (appliances, sets of golf clubs, wide screen televisions, jewelry) to the slightly bizarre (a foozball table, an electronic tracking system for your dog, a cooking demonstration in your home for you and ten of your nearest and dearest). Richard and I had fun poking around the list, pondering various items. The electronic tracking system was tossed around, if only briefly, merely for the amusement factor of the debate over whether or not it would fit on a squirrel, and whether we could even catch a squirrel to collar it anyway (no sense in electronically tagging the cats, since they remain indoors and in as sedentary a position as possible for as many hours at a time as they can manage). We toyed with the idea of getting the super cool coffee machine that did nearly everything to coffee you could imagine. But in the end, we decided on a little handheld GPS unit, because we’ve been talking about getting one for a while, and as fun as tracking a squirrel as it runs through the wild might be, the GPS unit would actually get more use.

Last weekend we were in the mood for ice cream, so we used the little GPS unit (henceforth known here as Jeeves, because I selected for it a male voice with a British accent) to find the nearest little local ice cream parlor. And as we were meandering through all manner of cute little residential streets, we stumbled upon signs for a home and garden tour to be held this weekend, in one of the older neighborhoods in Sacramento. Score!

So that was Saturday’s walking binge. We picked up our tickets and our map at the community center in Curtis Park, and set off to go wander through seven very different types of houses, all of which were built in the 1920’s and 1930’s. They ranged in style from a traditional Tudor, with an absolutely marvelous two-story turrent entryway, complete with mounted moose head on the wall, to a rather stark and industrial sort of Moderne house, painted in gun metal grey and sporting the sort of minimalist decor one might find in an Ikea catalog (not our style at all, but it was still interesting to see). We wandered across original wood floors that still had the inlaid borders around the edges, and walked through beautiful gardens with little hidden seating areas and lots of flowers and built in outdoor kitchens hiding back behind ivy coated walls. By the time we were done with the seventh house we’d been walking for about two hours and were getting a bit worn out, but it was a lot of fun. It was getting hot out by the time we were finished, but most of the walking was shaded, due to all the huge trees that line the streets, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Today, however, didn’t have as many trees to provide shade, and the temperatures went up to the low 90’s during the afternoon, so being outside walking around today wasn’t nearly as refreshing as it had been Saturday morning. It was already warm enough outside to make the upper level of the house a bit stuffy by the time we got up this morning; by the time we made it to Woodland to meet Richard’s parents at the Scottish Games, it was getting downright hot. And while there are a lot of shade structures and some trees scattered around the Yolo County Fairgrounds, it was still very, very warm.

It was fun to wander around the grounds and check out all the booths though. We were good and did not buy anything, mainly because we still have yet to hang any of our existing artwork on the walls in the house, despite having been there for nearly a year now. We ate Celtic Rolls for lunch, which were basically some kind of spiced meat mixture wrapped in puff pastry (not very traditional, but we were aiming for something small, and that was about the only choice we had). We watched border collies have a ‘tea party’ (cute, but long). We listened to several musical groups perform, one of which included a didgeridoo in every song. We were hoping to see large burly men tossing telephone poles, but the only thing being tossed the whole time we were there were hammers (huge weights attached to poles).

It’s been a long weekend, what with all the walking, even though it doesn’t feel as if we got much actually done (as is obvious from the growing accumulation of dust bunnies lurking underneath the furniture). But it was a fun weekend nonetheless, full of walking and seeing new things and eating delicious food and doing a little knitting and a little writing and that makes up for the sore muscles and sunburned faces that are all that’s left of two very long days.

Last week was kind of a crazy week at work, mostly because we (the office, that is) moved this weekend and so there was all this work leading up to the event that had to be dealt with. Actually, the past month or so has been leading slowly up to the crazy of last week, what with the sorting and the purging and the random piles of stuff that kept piling up in the front lobby either waiting to be carted off to the dump or a recycling place, or the random piles of boxes that kept piling up near one of the extra work stations, full of things for the new place.  There have been scheduled posted and lists made and checked off, and great piles of boxes delivered, waiting for us to assemble them and then fill them with stuff. And last week we slid head on into the full-scale panic packing mode, which is bad enough trying to do if you are moving your own self, but even worse when you are doing it in a work environment where you are also supposed to be trying to get actual *work* done at the same time.

The actual move happened this weekend, and I do not think I need to say how truly happy I was that last Friday just so happened to be my Flex Day, which meant I got to avoid the very last day of pre-move panic. I just got to show up Monday morning at the new office space. I would say it all happened without me having to lift a finger, but that would be a lie, because someone had to disassemble all the computers and stuff them into boxes and cart them, manually, over to the new space, and that someone, by the way, would be me.

But now we are all moved in, and even though it is going to be a week or so before the office looks more like an office and less like a box hurricane hit it, we are all quite happy about the whole thing. The new space is prettier and newer and just nicer overall. The old building we were in was quirky and had lots of natural light and was right on the river so we had amazing views and got to see all kinds of wildlife and it had a lot of very good qualities. But it also was an older building and didn’t have very good insulation in the walls and I spent the last five years listening to the lawyers downstairs shriek obscenities at each other (I always wondered why they continued to work with each other if they hated each other that much, but maybe that is just how they got in shape for the courtroom. Who knows) and the past three years listening to the neighbors next door drop heavy boxes on the floor over my head Every Freaking Day, or decide to play their music extra loud even though they had been told numerous times, quite politely, by both us and the landlord, that we could hear them.

When I got in yesterday I set up my desk and hooked up my computer and when the IT guy arrived he showed me how to hook up all the computers to the network (by the way, whoever installed the firewall and the hub and all the rest of the networking and server gear is much, much taller than I am, and I can see that maybe keeping a step stool in the server room might be a good idea) and we got everyone online and running. I took advantage of the fact that our new space has a lovely, private balcony and I ate my lunch outside, looking out over the river. And I  marveled at how quiet my office is – although the AC system is so loud that even if there were lawyers hollering at the top of their lungs below me I am not sure I would hear them in this new space.

Of course, another side benefit to having recently moved our office is that there are now all these lovely, sturdy packing boxes being emptied that would otherwise be dumped in the recycling bin if it weren’t for the fact that I am snagging as many as I can get my hands on. The designer dropped off the full, final plans for us – including the structural engineer’s report – and a copy is now in the hands of our contractor so that he can hash out a more comprehensive idea of schedule and budget. I’ve already gotten a few volunteers to come help us do our own demo (because seriously, who *wouldn’t* relish the opportunity to take a sledgehammer to ugly kitchen cabinetry without fear of reprisal because we are not going to save one damn thing in there!), so now it is just a little waiting game – waiting to find out how long the contractor needs to get the kitchen to the point where the cabinets can be installed, so that we can finally pick a start date. And then all these boxes I am carefully salvaging from this oh-so-conveniently timed office move will be put to good use for packing away our entire kitchen. Soon. So very soon.

It wasn’t all yard work this weekend, although it might have felt that way by Saturday evening. Saturday morning Richard went off to a writer’s workshop brunch and I stayed home and decided to finally tackle one of my big, looming projects, which was to organize, photograph, and record my yarn stash. I have been avoiding it mainly because it is a rather tedious process – I have to pull out each skein (or group of skeins) individually, set them up, photograph them (and here is where my lovely Gorilla tripod comes in *so* handy!), then upload the pictures off the camera card, crop, size, and color-fix them, upload them to a folder where I could then image-slurp them into Ravelry, and then enter in all the relevant information (brand, color, dye lot, and so on). I made it through two huge batches of yarn – all my lace weight and all my sock weight – before Richard came home.

Sunday we met some friends for brunch, and because it was so lovely outside, we decided to walk there and back. They gave us about 45 minutes heads-up for when they were going to get there, which was the perfect amount of time for us to stroll the 1 1/2 miles there. Every time we do this – go for a walk – I am reminded again how much I love this area – all these little old, quirky houses and the beautiful trees and flowers, all blooming with a riot of color.

We dawdled over rich, cheesy omelets and waffles and endless cups of coffee for several hours, talking and laughing, and then they headed off home and we set out walking once again. It was warmer by then, of course, so we took a quick detour through a (thankfully air conditioned) open house along the way, and then got home and threw open all the windows and turned on all the ceiling fans and Richard went off to a reading by a writer he knew and I curled up on the sofa with a book and some knitting and did not move until he returned.

We ate dinner out and wrote out a detailed menu for the week that necessitated going to two different grocery stores to stock up, and I made a halfhearted attempt to get one more batch of yarn cataloging done (although only the details and not the images are online – I’ll have to pull those off the camera some time this week) . Richard washed dishes and I made a batch of spaghetti for lunches for the week and set up a new batch of yogurt to ‘cook’ overnight, and at one point we both went outside and stared at the progress our little vegetable garden has made in just the 24 hours since we were out there yesterday, just because there is something still a little magical about seeing things that you planted grow.

They’ve been predicting lovely weather for this weekend for a while now, and I admit that I was half looking forward to it, and also half not. One of the problems of it turning from cold and soggy to warm and sunny is that we can no longer rely on Mother Nature to take care of watering all the plants for us, and that means that it was time to deal with the drip hoses and the raised flower beds in the back yard.

At some point in this house’s history, someone put in a great deal of effort and time to create some lovely raised brick flower beds that line one entire side of the back yard. There are all manner of green things growing in them – some we recognize, like the pomegranate tree and the grapefruit tree, and the (sadly deceased) peach tree – and some we do not. As winter has faded into spring, it’s been fun to look outside and see new color in some of the beds – bulbs that have obviously been lying happily dormant since this time last year; flowers on some of the bushes, new buds on some of the trees. Seeing all this new growth had made me even more determined to keep anything else from dying due to lack of water and basic neglect (in our defense, the peach tree was on its way out when we moved in last summer, but I suspect our rather lax watering probably hastened on its demise), and since installing automatic sprinklers is not even remotely in the budget while the (very expensive) kitchen renovation looms ahead of us, the only way this was going to happen is if we got out there and took care of it ourselves. So nice weather for the weekend meant that today was the day.

Luckily some of the old hoses just needed some minor repairs to become functional again, but there were some hoses that had to be yanked out completely, and others that we’re just going to leave in place because they’re half buried in dirt, or embedded in cement, and it just doesn’t seem worth the effort to try to extricate them. Amusingly, it is obvious that this is not the first time this has been done, as there are at least two ‘layers’ of drip hose in some of the beds; whoever did it last time left even older hoses behind as well. Between the two of us we figured out which ones could stay and which ones needed removing, and then Richard tackled the ones in the back yard while I rummaged around in the beds in the front yard, tracked down the capped end of the existing hoses, and laid out enough new line so that at the very least, all the beds in the front will get watered with a little less effort from us.

We’ve tossed around the idea of putting in some of those battery operated automatic timers, but since we’re going outside twice a week to water the veggies anyway, we opted instead for just the little manual timers – chances are more likely we’ll remember to turn the hoses on, but this way we won’t have to worry about also remembering to turn the hoses back *off*. And while we were at Home Depot picking up hose timers, we also picked up some frames for the tomatoes because they are growing like mad (there are even two little flower buds on one of the plants!) , and then since we were right there in the vegetable department anyway, we also picked up a selection of herbs and a red and a yellow bell pepper plant to add to the mix. We’re going to have a serious ant problem when the veggies start producing – that much is obvious any time I dig in the soil in the vegetable bed – but so far everything seems to be doing well. And now that we’ve got all the new hoses in place, the only remaining part of our yard that might still suffer is the lawn, but I’m not all that attached to having grass in the backyard anyway, and also we picked up a new three-head sprinkler system for the front yard, so I’m hoping even that becomes a non-issue. It’s all about baby steps when it comes to gardening around here – I am still not seeing the allure of puttering around in the dirt and prickly green things and ants and giant carpenter bees, but this is a lot more involved than we ever got at the old house, so surely that’s got to count for something.

There were a lot of things I probably could have been doing this weekend. The little enclosed back porch needs clearing out before we start demolition (and the way things are going, that’s likely going to be very soon). The remaining library walls still need priming and painting. There’s boxes that need putting in the attic or the carriage house, and counters that need tidying, and we ran out of coffee on Friday.

But instead I got up each morning, and went out to breakfast with Richard (to the local bagel place, due to the aforementioned lack of coffee in the house), and then he drove off to his writing retreat in Shingle Springs, and I carefully collected my coffee and my knitting and my books and an afghan or two, and settled myself into the couch and camped out for most of the day. I read. I worked on sock. I watched lots of reruns on HGTV and the Food Network. I made myself open faced omelets for lunch – loaded with chopped peppers and cheese – and sipped slightly flat soda from a big glass mug. I dozed a little bit, there on the couch, with my afghans and my books and sometimes up to four cats on me at a time. It was lovely. I did this all day Saturday, until I had to get up and collect all my things and head off to sing for the last concert, and I did this all day Sunday, until Richard returned from his writing retreat and I simply could not stand sitting still any longer and had to get up and do *something* useful, like clearing off the dining room table and running a load of laundry. We went out to dinner and had sandwiches and salads of mixed greens and then we went to the grocery store to pick up coffee and bagels and other things, and then we came home and he camped out in the living room with me (although he had his laptop while I had my knitting). We finally watched the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica and a few other things we’d had stored on the DVR, and the cats curled up on us or near us in various states of purring or snoring, and it was a truly lovely weekend all around.

The garden is, so far, doing really well. Twice a week Richard and I go out there, together, armed with our bucket of water and our measuring cups, and dutifully water each one the amount the book says we should. It’s been fun to see how much some of the plants have grown in just such a short time. We separated out an entire head of garlic and planted each clove individually and so far there are 9 shoots popping out of the ground. It’s good that we both like garlic so much. The tomatoes all seem to be doing quite well, and while it looks a little anemic yet, so far the lettuce has managed to remain alive. The only thing that isn’t showing much sign of life are the carrots, although this morning I spotted one tiny little shoot that I am pretty sure is a carrot and not a weed. We’ll see.

Work on the kitchen design is also going along well. Last Friday we met the designer at a stone showroom and wandered around a warehouse filled with slabs of stone in every color and pattern, until we picked out the one that will soon become our countertops. The showroom for tile was a bit overwhelming – you just wander around through room after room after room of choices – but despite that, we’ve picked our backsplash tile. Two more things to check off the list. Richard and I also dutifully went to another big showroom this week to look at sinks, but I don’t think either of our hearts was really into it, and also I have very definite opinions about what I do and do not want in a kitchen sink, and those opinions do not seem to mesh with most of what is currently in style. Seriously, what is the *point* of having a double-bowl sink if one bowl is so small and shallow that you cannot even put a pot into it? Bah.

Aside from obsessively staring at seedlings and pondering the relative merits (or lack thereof) of various kitchen acoutrements, it’s been all about the singing for me lately. Last weekend I had a rehearsal on Saturday, and I hosted a rehearsal at our house on Sunday, where ten of us crowded around the dining room table and did a lot of laughing and also a lot of really good vocal and music work. And then there was rehearsal on Monday, which was rather tense because there is so much music in this concert that we have not actually sung through some of it since the beginning of the rehearsal cycle and everyone was tired and stumbling over notes that we all *know*, and consequently cranky. Last night’s rehearsal was somewhat better, if only because we all had a few days to breathe deeply and rethink some of the trouble spots and relax, although last night there was the added pressure of singing for the actual composer of all the music in this concert’s repertoire, so that was a bit unnerving (because no matter how nice and gracious he might be, it’s still disconcerting to be singing the music to the one person in the world who will *know*, without a doubt, if you have made a mistake) until he actually decided to come join us on stage and sing along with the baritones, and then it was just so random and unexpected that we all could relax again.

We have two concerts this weekend – the first tonight, and the second tomorrow night – and I know we will do well and all those little trouble spots will smooth away, because that is the way these things always happen, and there will be the usual rush of adrenaline and joy when we get up there and make music, but right now I want nothing more than for it to be Saturday night, after the concert, so I can go home and collapse on a chair with some cats and some Knitting and not have to think about music…at least until the next cycle starts up again in a few weeks.

I have not been very good about cooking much lately – I think the only things I’ve made in recent weeks are a batch of cornbread (to go alongside chili for dinner) and shredded chicken in the crockpot (toss 4 chicken breasts into a crockpot, top with one onion, chopped, and one package of taco seasoning, cover and cook all day, then immediately shred with fork and serve as filling for tacos, topping for salads, or whatever else you want. So delicious!). Oh, and let us not forget my one foray into experimental cooking in recent weeks – Black Bean Brownies. When I saw this recipe I was so intrigued by the idea that I knew I *had* to make them, if only for the amusement factor. We don’t have a food processor, and the blender chose that exact moment to die, so I had to mash up the beans and nuts by hand, but the brownies themselves turned out surprisingly good. If you were not told there were beans in the recipe you would never guess – except for that one where Richard said he found an actual whole bean, and I will agree with him that finding a bean inside a brownie is all kinds of disconcerting and wrong – and the inclusion of the instant coffee makes them richer and darker than your normal, average, bean-free brownies might be. I don’t think I’ll ever be making them again – it’s a lot of work for a brownie, no matter how amusing the idea of bean brownies might be – but as far as experimental cooking goes, I think I can count this one as a success.

First, a little update on the state of the kitchen design. Friday morning the designer came over, accompanied by a carpenter lugging a rather large (and apparently heavy) box of samples. The designer was also lugging something, but the rolls of designs in his hand were likely significantly lighter – one copy for him, one for the carpenter and one for us. It’s the complete to-scale drawings that include not just the top-down layout, but also detailed sketches of each side of the kitchen as seen from straight on. We now know where every cupboard and every drawer will be located. There’s even views from all sides of the center island.

The carpenter came along because next up on the To Do list was the cabinetry. Since we knew Richard wouldn’t be able to be there to meet with them (he was at work, while this was my Flex Friday, and thus I was off), we’ve been poking around on various websites, checking out stains and colors and door styles to make sure we were in synch on what we wanted. Luckily we share pretty similar taste in this sort of thing, so I’d printed out the door style we both liked, in preparation.

So far most of what we’ve done for this kitchen design has been pretty painless, and this step was no exception. I showed them my print-out of the door style, and then brought up the same image online so they could see a better picture. When it came to color, I just trotted right back into the office and brought up the picture of the sample kitchen with the stain color and treatment that we both liked. And by the time we were done, we’d made an appointment to go look at countertops, and the carpenter left me with three little sample squares of what our cabinet doors will look like, and I had tacked the new detailed design specs to the wall so we can now stop and look at it at any time.

Now for the ‘dirt’ part of the entry. I’ve been wanting to do a vegetable garden for a very long time. But the thought of getting outside and actually setting one up has always been extremely daunting. I am not an outdoorsy type of person, and my idea of yardwork has always leaned more towards the ‘pay someone else to do it’ side of the spectrum. But a vegetable garden is something one has to do oneself.

I’ve seen people talking about the Square Foot Garden idea online, and thought it sounded fairly simple. I got the book last year for a birthday or Christmas or something, and dutifully read through it, and looked up directions, and so this weekend we planned to build ourselves our own garden box. I even enlisted Richard to help me because I knew that if I could just get it set up, then taking care of it would be easy. It’s the way I am for a lot of things – it’s always the ‘getting started’ that is the hardest step.

Here’s where the previous owners’ (one of them, at any rate) love of raised garden beds came in extremely handy. There are a number of raised brick beds lining the backyard, most of which are filled with trees and bushes and random flowering things, including a few scattered bulbs (which we didn’t discover until a month or so ago, when they suddenly started popping up and blooming like mad). But there are two beds in the very back that have been filled with nothing but weeds, and I have long suspected that a lot of the strange cement configurations back there were originally set up as garden plots.

So on a whim, we went outside and measured the larger of the two weed-infested boxes, and what do you know. Turns out it’s exactly four feet wide inside, and one foot tall (just the height a square foot garden box is supposed to be). It’s also ten feet long, but we didn’t need to use all of it. Just a little less than half.

Saturday we dragged over a drip hose and coiled it all over the top of the weeds and let the water run all morning and all afternoon to thoroughly soak it. That evening we went out and pulled up enough of the weeds and grass to clear out a four foot long section of the bed, and then we hopped in the car and zipped over to the little local nursery and, armed with information from the Square Foot Garden book, bought some huge sacks of compost and an assortment of spindly little vegetable seedlings. It seemed somehow appropriate that Sunday morning, on a day one is supposed to celebrate new birth anyway, was when we went out, armed with large serving spoons (they work fine for digging in dirt), and planted ourselves a vegetable garden.

I suspect we’re probably going to regret planting as many tomatoes as we did (four regular, four cherry). But there were so many heirloom varieties to choose from that it seemed a shame to just pick one. Plus my little sister and I have already been tossing around the idea of getting together (once we have our nice new kitchen) and doing a bit of canning. So I figure by the time that happens, I’ll be positively swimming in tomatoes and more than ready to turn a majority of them into sauce.  We also put in two green bell pepper plants, and a square each of butter crunch lettuce and spinach, and I put in two squares of carrots because I remember how delicious fresh-grown carrots can taste. There is also one square of garlic planted, just to see if it will grow.

We didn’t end up filling up even the four-foot-by-four-foot section we’d cleared. And some of the plants I really want to try growing (beans, peas, cucumbers) will need a trellis so they can be vertically trained, so I suspect that won’t happen until next year (although luckily the smaller of the two empty beds already has its own trellis so when we get around clearing that one out, we’ll be all set). Right now, though, I’m just excited that I finally have a vegetable garden. Here’s hoping that somehow, despite ourselves, we’ll manage to keep at least part of it alive long enough to get something edible out of it.

Weather reports said it was supposed to rain this weekend, and by Friday afternoon, it sure did *look* like that was going to be the case – slightly overcast, gray, cold and windy outside, and that ‘impending rain’ smell in the air. But when I woke up on Saturday morning, there wasn’t a hint of rain cloud in the sky – just clear blue, and big white fluffy clouds. It was the perfect sort of day to tackle some overdue projects outside.

When we moved last July we went from a house with a two car (plus space) garage to a house with no garage to speak of. There is the carriage house in the back, of course, but there doesn’t appear to be any functional lighting in there, and to be honest, dragging a ladder in there and peering around in dark and (likely) spider-infested corners to figure out what needs plugging in and what simply needs a new bulb has been pretty low on the priority list. So the carriage house has sat mostly empty this entire time, save for our bikes, and most of the stuff that had been living in the garage at the old place was stuffed haphazardly underneath the back deck, to be dealt with at some later date. Recent wind storms have since turned the gathering of stuff into an even more unwieldy mess, knocking over some of the shelves and blowing lighter items across the lawn. And while we don’t go into the backyard all that often, it has bothered me to look at that mess every time  peer around the corner of the house and it comes into view.

This weekend we finally tackled the mess. We dragged all the metal shelving units into the carriage house and lined them up in the back part, where there is less likely to be rain incursion in winter. We corralled all the extra boxes of wood laminate and trim from our floor-laying excitement last summer, and piled it all neatly on one stack. We filled up one shelf with all our camping equipment, and another shelf with random things like the last remaining case of little white holiday lights (I will never live down ordering that many, I realize this) and the old Christmas tree stand, and assorted odds and ends, and in the process, we managed to fill the trash bin completely with stuff we just needed to finally get rid of. All that’s left now is one shelf unit that I intend to use for gardening supplies, and a little more clearing that will have to wait until next weekend when the garbage bin is empty once again. Now that all that stuff is gone, the area under the back deck looks huge. So nice to have all that space available once again.

I also decided that this weekend was the perfect time to tackle some of the remaining boxes that have been sitting in piles here and there all over the house. So Saturday we also purged the upstairs guest room. I put all the boxes of CDs on the top shelves of the narrow little yarn closet, and we filled a trash bag to overflowing with the contents of several other boxes. While there is still one box left in that room to deal with, suddenly it looks far more spacious in there. The cats are certainly happier, since all those boxes were piled in front of the window, and now they have much better access to the sunbeams that come into that room in the early afternoon.

I have finally gotten around to clearing off my camera card, after weeks of taking pictures and never bothering to actually upload them. So this entry is mostly images (sorry, people with slow internet connections!). Here they are, in mostly random order.

Sebastian, taking advantage of the new cat shelf in the office as the perfect place to get a little sun (and the fact that it also provides a perfect view of squirrels and birds in those trees means nothing to him. Nothing at all).

Here is Azzie, wondering why I am sitting on the floor with a strange contraption (my camera on a tripod, because I was hoping to get a decent picture of him for a change).

Another shot of Azzie. I love his expression in this one.

Richard, trying to walk with ‘barnacles’ (my niece and nephews). I think this picture was from the evening after my mom’s 60th birthday party. My sisters and I used to do this to my dad when we were about that age too.

A few pictures from our trip to the San Francisco zoo back in February. I was having fun playing with the zoom on my camera (hence the extreme close-ups of the lemurs).

The river otters were far more playful than we’ve seen them before (also, it was apparently mating season for otters because, well, I’ll let you figure out the rest).

The end (ha ha ha – okay, I’ll stop now).

Monday afternoon, I was sitting at my desk, working. The only two coworkers in the office with me were standing by the front door, chatting. Then coworker #1 paused and said “What is that on the light? Is that a tarantula?”, and as my brain was slowly processing that particular comment (because I wasn’t paying attention to their conversation until I heard the word ‘tarantula’), the two of them shifted closer to the object in question, and then the second one said “No. It’s a bat.”

Yes, indeed, folks. There was a cute little bat in our office. It was all kinds of exciting there for a little bit. The bat moved off the emergency light and onto the floor, and since I realized rather quickly that I would likely never have this sort of opportunity again, I immediately dove into my purse for my camera and then did my best at taking a few pictures.

Unfortunately, this came out a bit blurry, mainly because we were all careful to stay a respectful distance away from the little critter, and I didn’t want to use a flash because I thought it might scare the bat, so this is the best I could do. It was such a tiny little thing – about the size of my hand – with little fuzzy round ears and a cute little face.

It crawled for a little bit along the floor, using its wings as its front ‘paws’, and one of my coworkers opened the front door, since it was fairly close by, and the second one constructed a makeshift wall of box lids behind the bat so as to encourage it to head toward freedom, and discourage it from deciding to move further into the office. It sat on the floor for quite a while, staring at the open door, nose twitching madly, little body quivering, and we were all a little worried it might be sick or hurt. Naturally, however, it waited until just when I finally gave up and called Animal Control, and was on the phone to someone explaining about our unexpected visitor, to decide that outside was far better than inside, and make its escape. Or rather, we sure *hope* that’s what it decided, because apparently bats are speedy little critters and none of us actually saw the thing leave.

I hope it found its way to a more comfortable spot to lurk, and that it wasn’t too traumatized by the ordeal. But I admit to doing a lot more peering up at the ceilings in our office now (we’ve got some high ones), and while the bat seems to be gone, we are left with several questions, the answers to which I am not sure I really want to know.

How did it get *into* the office in the first place? Is it going to come back? And perhaps most important of all, did it come alone?